Tech Life of Recht » 2008

JAOO Today

recht — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:16:03 +0000

This week is JAOO week – the software conference organized by Trifork. Again, I’m on the team publishing JAOO Today, the daily conference newsletter. This year, however, it’s not quite a newsletter, as it’s published online, but the content is still more or less the same: Interviews with interesting speakers, reviews, competitions, and much more.
No matter if you’re actually at JAOO or not, you should probably check it out – there’s a lot of great content. If you are actually at JAOO, please come by and say hi.

A Taxonomy of IT Conference Sessions

recht — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:57:19 +0000

JAOO is just around the corner, so I’ve started thinking about what to see. Knowing that it’s not exactly easy to decide beforehand, I started thinking about my previous conferences and kind of sessions I’ve attended. Because it’s somewhat JAOO related, the result has been posted at the JAOO blog. A followup is probably on the way… Of course, if you’ve not yet decided to go to JAOO, now is the time. You’ll get to meet all the cool people. And stuff.

Hindsgavl ‘08

recht — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:36:26 +0000

I’ve just returned from Javagruppens annual conference in Hindsgavl, which had “Enterprise Open Source Java” as the main theme. The agenda was dominated by how to use dynamic languages such as Groovy an (J)Ruby and how to scale systems. About 50 people attended, so the conference was in no way like the larger conferences, but the speakers were all very competent and good.
The most important outcome of the conference was that I became aware of several new possibilities with for example Groovy and JRuby. Now I just need to find some time to try them out.

2008 wishes

recht — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 13:02:35 +0000

The coming of a new year usually attracts a number of predictions, some more accurate than others. I’m no good at predicting, so I’ll give my wishes for the new year instead:

Get my Macbook Pro to work with the DVI-VGA adapter (done)
I’d like to be convinced that the dynamic languages are really the way forward. I see that they can do smart stuff, but I sorely miss some kind of help using whatever APIs are developed, besides the source code, and I can’t get used to working without a proper editor. I can probably live without the editor, but having methods like def initialize (options = {}) just hurts my eyes. I haven’t used Ruby/Rails that much, but I’ve already dug around more source code than I care to in order to find out what the legal options were.
Release Java 7 with proper closures. This probably won’t happen, and even when it does, it will take a couple of years before it’s adopted.
Already, I know that I’m going to spend a good part of my time fiddling around with huge WSDLs and schemas. Could somebody find a way to stop the black hole that is Web Services?
As for Linux on the desktop, that will still not happen, even though it should, especially when you look at the new distributions such as Ubuntu. However, I’m pretty satisfied, now I just need xmonad to support dynamic twinview, so I can add a monitor without restarting X
And to Apple: please take corporate customers seriously and make a docking station for the Macbook (Pro). I’m getting tired of plugging and unplugging 5 different cables every time I have to move my laptop.
Less focus on creating big monolithic systems, more on distributing across autonomous nodes.
Finally, it would be great with a proper vi-mode for Eclipse – like vimperator for Firefox.